Underneath, They’re All Toasters

Oh, there will be some universal constants. The hardware, for example, can’t help but become lighter, cheaper, and more standardized. You’ll never get the public at large to buy into VR so long as you require them to wear scuba diver face-masks and hockey goalie gloves, but the day Joe Consumer can walk out of Circuit City with a Virtual Blaster™ complete with Video Ray-Bans™ and Data Isotoners™ is the day we’ll be off to a good start.

The second important thing to remember is that, as much as it makes for good, visceral fiction, implanted interface devices will never really catch on. I mean, think about it: ignoring for the moment the immunological and infective dangers of surgically installed hardware, would you really want your brain rewired with a bunch of chips that are guaranteed to be obsolete within a year?

(If your answer to the above question is yes, please answer this one as well: are you still looking for a good web browser for your Commodore VIC-20?)

I’ll leave the rest of the hardware parameters for you to work out at home in your spare time. Most of them are fairly obvious linear extrapolations from current hardware trends. For example, what will happen to the price of AT&T stock when word gets out that you can use the Internet to transmit two-way audio, in real time, to any point on the planet, for the price of a local connect charge? And while we’re waiting for your stockbroker to return that panic-stricken phone call you just jumped up and made, let’s consider a philosophically more interesting question: when it does become widely available, how will people really use this brave new technology?

Why Wall Street Never Hires Sci-Fi Writers

For a hint at the answer, let’s return to that imaginary pile of pizza-stained SF paperbacks in the middle of the office floor, and pluck out—oh, True Names, by Vernor Vinge (1981). Neuromancer, by William Gibson (1984). Cyberpunk, by Bruce Bethke (1983). (On second thought, scratch that last one. It wasn’t that important.)

The point is, back in the dark, dim, days of the early 1980s, when this whole concept of navigating the Net using virtual reality tools was being hammered out by ignorant authors on Underwood manual typewriters, we all thought the future would require everyone to buy into a consensual vision of the cybernetic landscape. (Of course, we didn’t use terms like that then. We had to invent them as we went along.) Today, in the age of DSS, 700-channel television service, and personal web pages, it becomes increasingly obvious that the SF vision of the early 80’s was dead wrong, and that there are in fact only three truly universal consensual human activities: sex, warfare, and hanging out in the bar afterwards, talking about sex and warfare. And I know a lot of women who will argue that the first two are actually one and the same.

Thus, we must discard the idea of one big happy consensual virtual reality that everybody gets to play in, and come to the first bifurcation that defines the multiple futures of VR: personal reality versus collective reality.

The Center of The Universe Is In My Navel

As is clearly and painfully obvious to anyone who’s spent some time checking out personal web pages, each of us lives in our own personal reality, and in many cases it only tangentially intersects with that which an impartial outside observer might term "objective" reality. Getting philosophical for a moment, this is an instinctive and altogether natural rejection of Coperican science.

(Backfill: Copernicus was the first major Western thinker to posit that the center of the universe was not St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and live. Thank you, Pope Clement VII.)

For as any newborn infant will tell you, usually loudly and at 4 in the morning, each of us is born believing that we alone are the absolute center of the universe, and all else exists to serve us. Adults spend a lot of time and energy during the child-rearing years trying to disabuse their children of this notion.

Then the kid gets a personal web page, and all those years of education and socialization go right out the window. Goodbye, altruistic and empathic adult. Hello, self-absorbed God/Emperor of a Private Universe. It’s worse than a 14-year-old with her own phone line.

Excuse Me, Are Those Your Points?

And so, having laid out the parameters for this projection of the future, we take the above ideas, stir in 20 years of time, add a dash of next-generation VR technology, set the author’s brain to extrapolate, and plug in our original question: What does the future hold?

Case Study #1: The Extremely Personal Reality

Sadly, the subject of our first case study is far, far too typical. A single male in his late 20’s, a technical professional with a not-altogether-successful work history and a downright disastrous romantic life, he is in a word baffled by human relationships, and thus spends increasing amounts of time cocooned in his own private virtual reality, which runs on a standalone system installed in the bedroom of his apartment. In his personal reality, all the women are receptive, all the men non-threatening, and he’s the absolute life of the party—because after all, he’s the only real person actually there. Everyone else is a mere simulation, either purchased off-the-rack or downloaded from one of the many character exchanges on the Net, and he secretly exults in his godlike ability to add, rewrite, and erase his "friends" as they either interest or bore him.

At one time he actually tried to hang out in some of the virtual bars and chat rooms that exist in virtual environs on the Net, but he has slowly withdrawn from these, as the challenge of interacting with real people in real time remains the same no matter whether he is physicially or virtually "there." The same difficulty keeps him out of the many virtual brothels that have sprung up all over the Global Net and are the 21st Century equivalents of 1-900-FONE-SEX. Instead, lately he’s been spending increasing amounts of time in his bootlegged copy of Virtual Gilligan’s Island, playing the role of the Professor, and fantasizing about threesomes with Ginger and Mary Ann.

Case Study #2: The Swivel-Chair Warrior

Our second subject was well on way to being just like our first when he made an astonishing discovery: in collective VR, he was good at sports. Not only that, but he soon realized that for him, the thrill of victory was not half as gratifying as watching his opponents suffer the utter agony of defeat.

Now our subject is the consumate gamesman, and spends all of his free time in collective realities, searching for new games to master, new challenges to overcome, and new opponents to beat the stuffings out of. (Sports, after all, being simply a metaphor for war.) This latter bill is not always easy to fill, for as our first case study shows, the world is full of people who dream of hitting the home run that wins the World Series, but rather short on people who dream of being the losing pitcher. Subject #2 spends very little time in his personal reality, except to practice and train for upcoming action in collective Net realities.

NOTE: Subject was 20 years old before he realized DOS was not an acronym for DOOM Operating System.

Case Study #3: The Party Girl

In her senior year of high school Subject #3 was voted "The Girl Most Likely To." Now she’s 35, divorced, the mother of three teenagers who live with their father, and working in a meaningless job with zero career potential.

This doesn’t bother her though, because when she gets home from work she puts on her VR gear and goes cruising the virtual clubs on the Net, looking for a good party where she can be the center of attention. And 99-percent of the time, she finds it---

For on the world-wide web it’s always midnight somewhere, and in virtual reality she will always be 20, thin, sexy, and beautiful. Even better, in VR there are no hangovers, no health worries, no strangers using your toothbrush when you wake up the next morning....

Subject #3 does maintain a small, personal reality, in the form of a Medieval dungeon. The sole occupant is a virtual simulation of her ex-husband.

Case Study #4: The Working Stiff

"Wait a minute," you ask, "is everybody in the future a neurotic and dysfunctional loner?"

Actually, no. The majority of people are like Subject #4, a clerical employee at a mid-sized corporation. She spends her entire day using virtual reality tools to manipulate files, generate reports, and research archival information in response to customer and supervisor requests. But if you asked her how she likes working in virtual reality, she’ll answer, "Huh?"

To explain this reaction, we must step back 20 years, to the mid-1970s. The hot interface technology then was the VDT (video display terminal), and computer professionals around the world were just thrilled to be junking their old Teletypes and DecWriters and moving up to clean, dependable, and quiet CRTs (cathode-ray tubes).

Ask someone now how they feel about VDT, and they’ll claim they always practice safe sex.

Hence the reaction of Subject #4. She spends all day working with the descendant of today’s hottest technology, but as far as she’s concerned it’s just the damn computer she uses every day to do her job: too slow, too clumsy, and too often, down. As far as the interface she uses, that’s just the way it works, and she doesn’t give it a second thought.

Case Study #5: The Yuppie From Hell

Subject #5, on the other hand, might easily be mistaken for a psychiatric out-patient. She is constantly engaged in animated conversations with thin air, punctuates her statements with bits of incoherent mime, and never, ever takes her expensive, stylish, half-tinted glasses off.

On closer inspection though, the truth slinks out. She’s not in need of a medication adjustment (at least, not for the obvious reasons); she’s actually hard at work using the very latest in portable VR technology. Combining elements of cell-phone communications, wireless networks, and Italian style, her jewelry and accessories feature tiny piezo speakers in the earrings, a lavalier microphone in the necklace, a heads-up VR display in the glasses, and a teeny, tiny TV camera in that big gaudy ring that she keeps waving around like she’s the Green Lantern or something. The real breakthroughs, though, are her oversized bracelets. Loaded with delicate sensors, they actually track the tiny electrical currents through her carpal tunnel nerves, thus achieving the effect of reading her finger movements without actually covering her hands. This, combined with the ability to superimpose virtual reality images on the real world via her glasses, enables her to handle phone calls, participate in teleconferences, and interact with her software information agents anywhere, anytime.

When she gets on the freeway in her Lexus, she is a screaming terror to herself and everyone around her.

Case Study #6: The Sower of Discord

Subject #6 considers himself the natural mortal enemy of Subject #5. He’s a bright fellow, with a pronounced anarchic streak, who spends his days searching for people like Subject #5 and trying to figure what what frequencies they’re using. Then he uses his own VR gear to invade their personal network and try to "freak them out" with induced virtual hallucinations....

It’s not much of a life, but it keeps him off the dole. We recommend giving him a street-theatre grant in hopes that he’ll get bored and go away.

Case Study #7: The Trekkite Colonies

Finally, we come to Case Study #7, the ultimate in collective virtual reality. To the unaugmented eye their neighborhood looks like any other slightly run-down lower-middle-class city block—

But strap on your official Geordi LaForge™ visor, stuff in your Lt. Uhura™ earplugs, and clip on your ST: NextGen™ comm badge; set your Universal Translator™ for the local short-range cellular channel; and suddenly you’re completely immersed in the 24th Century!

Now, there are some experts who claim that these sort of commercially-licensed collective fantasies are escapism of the worst kind, and that they give new meaning to the phrase "delusional architecture." But those who find themselves disturbed by Trekism and similar techno-cults can take solace in this thought. Like the Amanas, the Mennonites, and so many others before them, the children who grow up in this commune will hate the whole repressive thing and will tear it all down the first chance they get.

We Now Return to the Present

Please secure your carry-on baggage, close and lock your tray table, and return your seat-back to an upright position. Have a nice time in the present, and don’t forget to call your stockbroker. Soon.